New startup ideas · Money rails for agentic commerce · Merchant readiness for agent traffic
startup concept
Counterproof
Chargeback evidence built from agent consent records and scoped tokens
Counterproof assembles dispute representment packages for agent-placed orders by pulling the issuer-signed consent record, the token scope, the policy version and the agent identity into the evidence format each network expects.
- Infrastructure and APIs
- Enterprise
- Visa and Mastercard agent rails
2
similar startups, last 2 years (4 all-time)
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$1,000 · 6 weeks · 20 prospects
Prove that PSP dispute teams are already losing enough agent-order chargebacks to prepay $3,000 for a representment pilot, for $1,000 in 6 weeks.
Riskiest assumption · Mid-size PSPs are already losing enough cardholder-denies-authorization disputes on agent orders each month that a head of risk will prepay for a dedicated evidence tool now, rather than wait for their incumbent chargeback vendor to add an agent-evidence field.
1Focus group: who and where
Head of disputes or risk operations at a US payment service provider or merchant of record processing $100M-2B a year with ACP or other agent-initiated orders in the mix, whose analysts are now writing representment for 'cardholder denies authorization' claims on orders an agent placed.
where to find 20 · The Merchant Risk Council member community and its webinars, where dispute leads at PSPs congregate; the About-Fraud practitioner community; the Electronic Transactions Association member directory to build the PSP list; warm introductions through payments-focused investors and former colleagues.
2Sell first, build later
A design-partner pilot: representment packages for 100 agent-order disputes of one type, cardholder denies authorization, assembled from the consent record, token scope, policy version and agent identity in the format your network expects - first 25 packages within 30 days of case handoff, plus a win-rate comparison against your last 100 in-house submissions.
the ask · $3,000 per pilot, invoiced 100% at signing; production pricing quoted at $8-15 per package after the pilot
a real yes · A real yes is a signed SOW with the $3,000 invoice paid, or a signed LOI with a dated case handoff when procurement blocks prepayment; enthusiasm on a call, a free-sample request beyond the 3 teardown cases, or 'loop in our vendor team' is not a yes
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Agent-dispute volume interviews
$300 · 14 days
Book 15 calls with dispute and risk leads sourced from MRC, About-Fraud and the ETA directory. Ask for three numbers: monthly cardholder-denies-authorization disputes on agent orders, current win rate on them, and what evidence their representment is missing. The founder runs every call and logs the numbers in a shared sheet.
keep going if · 8 of 15 report at least 25 such disputes a month and a win rate under 30% on them
2. Hand-built representment teardown
$200 · 14 days
Ask 5 of the interviewed prospects for 3 redacted lost cases each. Hand-assemble the evidence package per case - issuer-signed consent record, token scope, policy version, agent identity - in the network's representment format, and send it back with a note on exactly which fields their submission lacked. Handing over cases is the engagement being measured.
keep going if · 3 of 5 prospects send redacted cases, and 4 of the 5 who see a finished package book a pilot-scoping call
3. Prepaid 100-case pilot close
$500 · 21 days
Pitch a design-partner pilot to 12 prospects: Counterproof assembles representment packages for 100 cardholder-denies-authorization disputes on agent orders, first 25 delivered within 30 days of case handoff, $3,000 invoiced at signing on a one-page counsel-reviewed SOW with an NDA.
keep going if · 2 of 12 pitched sign and pay the $3,000 invoice, or 1 pays and 1 signs an LOI with a dated start
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$3,000
per prospect, refundable
how · A paid design-partner pilot invoiced 100% up front at $3,000, signed by the head of risk on a one-page SOW with an NDA; where the PSP's procurement cannot pay before a vendor security review, take a signed LOI with a dated case handoff and named monthly case volume instead set up: Stripe Invoicing ↗
what it reserves · One of two design-partner slots, a 100-case representment run starting within 30 days of signing, and design-partner pricing locked for the first production year
refund · Refunded in full if the first 25 packages are not delivered within 30 days of case handoff.
target · 2 paid pilots, or 1 paid pilot plus 1 dated LOI, from 12 pitches within 42 days
before taking money · Dispute case files carry cardholder data, so work only on redacted or tokenized cases under an NDA and do not ingest raw PANs or cardholder PII before a PCI-DSS review.
Go: build it if
8 of 15 prospects report 25+ agent-order disputes a month with sub-30% win rates, and 2 pilots are prepaid with start dates within 6 weeks - build the API
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 5 of 15 prospects see even 10 agent-order disputes a month, or 0 paid pilots and 0 dated LOIs after 12 pitches - the volume is not there yet, park it and re-run the interviews in two quarters
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
Agent orders on your rails run a few months ahead of their disputes, and a cardholder-denies-authorization claim on an order a bot placed is a loser without the consent record. I'm building Counterproof: we pull the issuer-signed consent, token scope and policy version into the representment format Visa and Mastercard expect. Send me three redacted lost cases and I'll hand-build the packages free so you can judge the lift yourself. Worth a 20-minute call this week?
landing page
Win the agent-order disputes you can actually prove $3,000 design-partner pilot: 100 representment packages on cardholder-denies-authorization cases, first 25 delivered in 30 days Book a scoping call
deposit terms
The $3,000 pilot fee, invoiced at signing, reserves one of two design-partner slots and a 100-case representment run on cardholder-denies-authorization disputes from agent orders. The first 25 packages are delivered within 30 days of case handoff; if we miss that date, the fee is refunded in full. The remaining 75 follow within 45 days, with a win-rate report against your last 100 in-house submissions.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.
72
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 43.8 x 1.64
Warm
competition: more crowded than 44% of ideas · headwind x0.78
+2.9
government priorities, secondary (10 matching grants)
Trend
58
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)92
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector33
- Sector direction (live batch)50
Demand
32
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)33
100x potential
78
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Neighbours still alive78
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were chargeback, evidence, built, consent, records, scoped, tokens, assembles.
The concept in full
- What
- Counterproof assembles dispute representment packages for agent-placed orders by pulling the issuer-signed consent record, the token scope, the policy version and the agent identity into the evidence format each network expects. PSPs and merchants of record plug it in via API and stop losing 'I never authorized this' disputes on agent orders they can actually prove.
- Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
- Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol (September 2025); Mastercard Agent Pay (April 2025); both networks joined Google's AP2 protocol in September 2025; keyword coverage shows 'chargeback' at 1 company in the last two years against 31 for 'fraud'.
- What it rides
- Visa and Mastercard agent rails. Visa TAP's issuer-signed consent record and Mastercard Agent Pay's Agentic Token bound to one consent policy are dispute evidence that exists today but is not wired into any chargeback workflow.
- Why now
- Agent orders scaled roughly 13x on Shopify by Q1 2026 while the radar shows only one company touching chargebacks in two years; disputes lag orders by a few months, so the wave hits merchants right about now.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- One mid-size PSP processing ACP orders; start with a single dispute type, cardholder-denies-authorization on agent orders, and prove a win-rate lift on a hundred cases before generalizing.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Socratix AI (yc S25) gives fraud and compliance teams AI coworkers for investigation; Counterproof produces network-formatted evidence, not analyst assistance. End Close (yc W26) reconciles payments, it does not fight disputes. Otherwise none tracked.
- Main risk
- Dispute volume on agent orders stays too low in 2026 for PSPs to buy a dedicated tool before incumbent chargeback vendors add an agent-evidence field.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the concept's terms (chargeback, evidence, built, consent, records, scoped, tokens, assembles).
AI workers that attribute the outcome back to the token spend
Keeping contractors on the job site, not behind a desk.
Developer of a healthcare platform designed to ensure better outcomes through the use of diagnostic tests and lab reports. The company's product digitizes collected data from disparate hardware providers, interprets it, and then creates analytics dashboards to see how both individual patients and groups of patients are doing, enabling healthcare providers to determine treatment plans and pharmaceutical options for patients.
First agentic AI-powered community for 1 billion people with criminal…
Public money in this direction
US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase I · $305K
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
NIH / NHLBI · SBIR phase II · $1M
- A multi-function earplug that measures in-ear noise, standard noise dosimetry and hearing functionaward
NIH / NIDCD · SBIR phase I · $311K
National Science Foundation · CPS-Cyber-Physical Systems · $316K
National Science Foundation · MSI-Manufacturing Systms Integ · $300K
National Science Foundation · AI and Geosciences, Software Institutes · $2M
National Science Foundation · Software Institutes, AI and Geosciences · $449K
Other concepts in this collection
- QuadrailOne endpoint that speaks ACP, UCP, AP2 and both card network agent protocols
- CartproofContinuous conformance testing for merchant agent checkout endpoints
- TokentraceReconciliation built around scoped payment tokens for PSPs handling agent orders
- CountersignDispute defense for agent purchases using issuer-signed consent records
- DutylineLanded cost inside the agent checkout response for cross-border orders
- ConsentryVerification gateway that tells merchants which agent orders to trust
- KeyfleetCredential lifecycle for every AI agent a company lets spend money
- MintgatePolicy engine deciding when an agent gets a scoped payment token
- TrailproofAn audit agent that reconstructs consent for every dollar your agents spent
- HoldpointHuman approvals that become signed consent records for agent purchases
- MeterlinePer-agent stablecoin allowances and kill switches for machine-to-machine payments
- VetgateOne decision point for banks verifying agent credentials across every rail
- AttestaChargeback evidence packets built from agent consent records
- ReversioRefund rails for purchases made with expired scoped tokens
- TallybridgeReconciles agent-originated orders against ERPs and the general ledger
- VerdiktIssuer-side triage for disputes on agent-initiated transactions
- RefluentRefund and reconciliation layer for stablecoin agent payments
- DutybackRecovers duties and tax when cross-border agent orders come back
- SpendfenceBudgets, scoped tokens and approval policy for every agent a company runs
- NetformNetting and clearing for millions of tiny machine-to-machine payments
- CovenorYour AP agent negotiates terms and settles invoices with their AR agent
- FloatworksTreasury operations for the stablecoin float that funds agent budgets
- Recourse LabsDispute and refund rails for payments agents make on their own
- CharterlineLicensing and exam readiness software for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act
- RelayproofTravel rule data for stablecoin transfers that an agent initiated
- SievewireSanctions and AML screening built for machine-speed agent payments
- AttestlyOne evidence vault for agent checkout consent records and scoped tokens
- AmletAML program operations run by agents for seed-stage stablecoin PSPs
- YieldgateProof that stablecoin rewards are activity linked, not prohibited interest
- ClearquoteLanded cost inside the agent's checkout quote, duties and taxes priced before the token
- DrawpointAn agent that files duty refunds when cross-border agent orders come back
- PegwiseStablecoin settlement between the agent's currency and the merchant's, with locked FX
- DutygraphThe customs knowledge base agents query before buying across a border
- PortruleSpend policy for purchasing agents that buy from foreign suppliers
- AttestoRegulator-ready evidence for every cross-border stablecoin settlement an agent triggers
- ParflowRedemption operations API for stablecoin issuer programs
- StablebooksTreasury policy and reconciliation layer for companies holding stablecoins
- CorridorlinePayout orchestration across stablecoin rails with compliance evidence built in
- RegimarkAgent service that builds dual GENIUS and MiCA compliance evidence for issuers
- RewardrailCompliant activity-linked rewards engine for stablecoin issuers and platforms
- FeedstoneAn agent that builds and maintains your UCP and ACP catalog endpoints
- TracelightAttribution and revenue reporting for orders placed by AI agents
- GatewickThe traffic gate that tells buying agents from scraping bots
- ClausemarkPublish return, shipping and warranty policies agents can read and bind to
- StockproofReal-time inventory and price truth for agent catalog queries
Fictional concept generated 2026-08-26 by claude-fable-5 from the collection's brief and MarkosWeb data. Treat it as a research prompt, not a plan.